research

Most people all around the world know that an asteroid strike on the Earth is what killed off the dinosaurs. Scientists have been studying the crater left in Mexico for many years now trying to wrap their brains around what the colossal forces created by that impact were like. We know that it caused a mass extinction event that nearly killed all life on the planet.

Signs point to an underground ocean on Pluto thanks to information gathered by NASA's New Horizons probe. While the probe passed Pluto in July of 2015, information continues to travel back to Earth even now. Researchers pore over the information gathered and turn up new revelations every day. While not every finding in the data sent back to our planet is worthy of a massive news story - this one certainly is.

Testing of new medical breakthroughs in the US take a very long time to move from animal trials into human trials. In China a group of researchers led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu have become the first in the world to inject cells into a person that were edited using the CRISPR-Cas9 technique. The person who was injected with the cells is suffering from an aggressive lung cancer and the injection was part of a clinical trial at West China Hospital in Chengdu.

Tongtianlong limosus, the Mud Dragon, was caught in sticky mud in China over 66 million years ago - and died there. Of course it wasn't called China back then, and this was when our planet looked a lot different from what it looks like today. But back between 66 and 72 million years ago, the Mud Dragon gasped its last. Not long after the death of the Mud Dragon, our Earth changed drastically.

Researchers with Imperial College London and DNA Electronics have created a new USB stick that can detect HIV in blood. The device works somewhat like a blood sugar monitor, and involves placing a drop of blood on a sensor. The USB stick is then connected to a computing device where the results are determined and presented. The test could, among other things, allow medical professionals to detect and monitor HIV in patients in rural and remote locations.

Researchers have been working on ways to help the paralyzed regain control over their bodies for a very long time and a team has now made an potentially life changing breakthrough for paralyzed humans. Researchers at the Ecole polytechnique federale de lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have been able to give paralyzed monkeys control over their legs again using brain implants. So far testing has been conducted on two rhesus macaques that underwent implantation within two weeks of being injured.

According to a study newly published in Nature, plants are slowing the rate at which CO2 collects in the atmosphere, doing so at rates that have increased over past decades. This doesn’t mean the levels have stopped increasing or are reversing, keep in mind. Rather, CO2 continues to rise but at rates that are now more or less holding steady while emissions resulting from human activities have slowly decreased. Overall, atmospheric CO2 levels are still increasing, but much more slowly due to these plants.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources — known as CCAMLR — has announced that the Antarctic’s Ross Sea will soon be the largest marine conservation in the world. The marine protected area (MPA) at Ross Sea will cover 1.55 million square kilometers from certain human activities in order to help researchers meet specific goals, including things like fisheries management and conservation. Most of the regions will ban fishing, though exceptions will be made for scientific endeavors.

Researchers at Harvard University have created the very first entirely 3D printed organ-on-a-chip and the technique could open the door for more complex and customizable devices in the future. The heart-on-a-sensor chip has integrated sensing and was constructed using fully automated digital manufacturing procedure that allows for fast fabrication and customization.

According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control, a ‘superbug’ fungus called Candida auris may have passed through some health care facilities in the United States, marking a ‘need for attention’ amongst such facilities to help stop its spread. This fungus, unfortunately, is resistant to many anti-fungal medications, and was first isolated in Japan. Individuals in several countries have been infected with the fungus.

A new project at MIT for a wing that is able to change shape during flight is a bit of a throwback to the aircraft that the Wright Brothers first flew over a hundred years ago. The Wright Brothers used a system of pulleys and cables that twisted the wings of their aircraft to control flight. A new wing that is being developed by MIT uses a similar approach to allow the wing to morph and change shape for more efficient flight and manufacturing.

It’s unavoidable that, for the foreseeable future, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 will remain the butt of jokes when it comes to literally hot electronics. After all, heat and electronics don’t make for a good combination. Heat and organics, however, is important, from sustaining life to making sense of the world around us. Roboticists from Georgia Tech are trying to take advantage of the latter to give robots the ability to better identify objects. And they are doing so by giving these robots a “warm skin”.